Record-Setting Cosmic Structures Challenge Big Bang
How will big bang theorists deal with the latest news?
First there was the Great Wall. Then there was the Sloan Great Wall, and a supercluster system dubbed Laniakea. “But the newly spotted BOSS Great Wall, with a total mass perhaps 10,000 times as great as the Milky Way, is two-thirds bigger again than either of them,” New Scientist reports today about a billion-light-year galactic “wall” that may be the largest object observed in the cosmos so far.
Galaxy superclusters also have competition for the “biggest known object” crown. Some distant light sources like quasars or gamma ray bursts seem to be clustered together in certain regions of the sky. If they are truly connected, they belong to structures so large that current cosmological theories can’t explain them.
To be fair, the classification is subjective. Some astronomers think the material in the structures are not physically linked. If nothing else, though, they illustrate the lumpiness problem in cosmology. The universe is not a smooth sea of particles as theory would predict. Instead, “On the grandest scales, the universe resembles a cosmic web of matter surrounding empty voids – and these walls are the thickest threads.”
Far Out
Peering deep into space, a new “cosmic distance record” was set by the Hubble Space Telescope, reports the BBC News. A galaxy with redshift z=11.1 has been observed. It’s called GN-z11. Its high redshift would put its origin 13.4 billion years before the present in standard cosmology, a mere 400 million years after the big bang. The very first stars might become observable. “They are probably another 200 million light-years beyond even GN-z11.”
Dr Oesch and colleagues say GN-z11 is one-25th the size of the Milky Way with just 1% of our galaxy’s mass in stars.
“The surprising thing is how bright it is (for what it represents), and it’s growing really fast, producing stars at a much faster rate,” said the Yale astronomer.
“So, it’s challenging some of our models, but it’s showing galaxy build-up was well under way early on in the Universe, and it’s a great preview for [the] James Webb [Space Telescope], which will be pushing even deeper to see the progenitors of this galaxy.”
The James Webb Telescope may be able to see redshifts between 15 and 30, indicating objects only 100 to 250 million years after the big bang. Science Daily explains where GN-z11 needs to fit in current theory:
“The previous record-holder was seen in the middle of the epoch when starlight from primordial galaxies was beginning to heat and lift a fog of cold, hydrogen gas,” explains co-author Rychard Bouwens from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. “This transitional period is known as the reionisation era. GN-z11 is observed 150 million years earlier, near the very beginning of this transition in the evolution of the Universe.”
A galaxy of stars this mature so close to the beginning of the universe was not predicted by big bangers, Space.com says:
However, the discovery also raises many new questions as the existence of such a bright and large galaxy is not predicted by theory. “It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon,” explains Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Marijn Franx, a member of the team from the University of Leiden highlights: “The discovery of GN-z11 was a great surprise to us, as our earlier work had suggested that such bright galaxies should not exist so early in the Universe.” His colleague Ivo Labbe adds: “The discovery of GN-z11 showed us that our knowledge about the early Universe is still very restricted. How GN-z11 was created remains somewhat of a mystery for now. Probably we are seeing the first generations of stars forming around black holes.”
If this trend continues, the James Webb telescope may push theory to the breaking point after it launches in 2018.
A piece on PhysOrg states, “The early universe consisted almost entirely of hydrogen atoms, but at some point – probably about 500 million years after the Big Bang – the first stars formed.” Something is dreadfully wrong here. One cannot have a galaxy turning up 100 million years earlier than the first stars. Maybe the new physics theory announced by PhysOrg will rewrite the textbooks. Readers may wish to see why a Caltech astronomer found something “frustrating, but interesting” about the first galaxies. “For a while we were convinced that we were missing something important,” he said on PhysOrg, but then he and his colleagues were “shocked” when theory matched his prediction. It must be a rare occurrence.
Other cosmologists, like those on Science Daily, will continue to speak glibly about the leading theory that posits “a region of space the size of a single proton vastly expanded to form the beginnings of our universe” in a fraction of a second. Somehow, the article says, the universe learned how to make French onion soup from that sudden explosive beginning.
Let’s recap. The big bangers did not predict this galaxy or the BOSS Great Wall. They were amazed. It was a great surprise. The GN-z11 galaxy should not exist, but it does. The big bangers admit that their knowledge about the early Universe is still very restricted, after decades of research. Such objects are a mystery to them. Their cosmological theories cannot explain them. And yet they get to keep their jobs? Sounds like government workers.
Comments
We know the Big bang took place. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. That is the Big Bang.
The heavens and the earth is all of the matter and energy in the universe. You can not name anything that is made of matter or energy that is not included. The heavens and the earth is all of space-time.
It was ALL created IN THE BEGINNING, or the first instance of time.
That is the Big Bang. The atheists fought against the Big Bang because they knew if the universe had a beginning that would point to a Beginner.
The Lord says the nations rage against Him in vain.
When the Big Bang Theory was first proposed it was fiercely opposed by the Steady State theorists because it seemed to support the idea of creation. If the universe was not eternal in some sort of a steady state, then something else came before it and that sounded too much like God. Now the Big Bang Theory is pushed as a completely naturalistic narrative that debunks the Bible “creation myth.” So these observations will also be re-jiggered and trotted out as supporting the naturalistic narrative in a few days. Don’t worry.
Ironically astrophysicists today are questioning the Big Bang as a single event that created the inflation of “space-time-matter-energy” of the Cosmos and now suspect that reality may instead be a “multiverse” of an infinite number of Big Bangs (Bubble Theory) with no beginning and no end. When most of science accepted the Big Bang as the single event that ceated the Cosmos and all of reality, the religious rejected it out of fear it was incompatible with the Book of Genesis when in reality they should have embraced it as evidence of their fundamental literal interpretation of creation in Genesis. (ie; God created the Cosmos as a single event) Now the religious are trying to disprove Big Bang and are unwittingly supporting new Comoslogical Theories. They should have embraced and stuck with the Big Bang because now science is revealing that the fundamental literal interpretation of Genesis is illusion.
However….in reality..science is ACTUALLY proving that the Bible reveals the absolute TRUTH of creation and man’s destiny. The Bible is VERY clear that before the Earth and the “Heavens” were created..God EXISTED even revealing the three manifestations of Him. (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) When God revealed creation to man in Genesis…..there was no way mankind could comprehend an infinite Cosmos…wha they could “see” was ALL of creation. The Truth is clear…..Science and the Bible reveals that “creation” is an infinite process…NOT AN EVENT.
2000 years ago “The Infinite” Incarnated as Yeshua ben Joseph (Jesus the Christ) who not only restores mankind to the Kingdom of the Infinite God by His Sacrifice on the Roman Cross He also revealed the “character and nature” of God as the Spirit of Love, Compassion, Patience, Forgiveness, Holiness, Beauty, Purity etc….. AND that when a person repents and accepts Jesus as Savior…..that person begins to tranform into this “character and nature” of God and becomes a member of the infinite Family of God. The following Scriptures lend support to this Truth….. Genesis 1:26, Psalm 82:3-6, John 14:8-23, Galatians 3:26-28, Colossians 1:27, 2:9-10, 1 Corinthians:3:16-17, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, 1 John 4:11-16. Jesus said the Kingdom of God is in our hearts…it’s about time Christians recognize this Truth
NOTE: It is criticle to understand that we are NOT “no longer sinners”…. we are “FORGIVEN sinners” …..however..as St Paul makes clear…our forgiven state is NOT a license to sin…if we stumble and fall…..we have an advocate in the Holy Spirit to help us repent and ask forgiveness if we do fall. BTW…if we believe will not sin after accepting Jesus….we just sinned! We must struggle not to fall into temptation. In Jesus Name..David
Hello David,
Thank you for commenting, but your comment is way too long and strays off the subject. The article concerns the lumpiness problem for the big bang. This is not a place for your personal blogging; you can start your own website for that. Here, stick to the subject at hand.
As for the big bang, I strongly encourage you to view Spike Psarris’s DVD “Our Created Universe” at http://creationastronomy.com . You need to know the implications of the big bang and the multiverse to be able to carry on an informed discussion about it and its relation to theology.
Editor
Lou,
I have thought about that too. How did God create the heavens and the earth. Could some of the actual physical processes He used be similar to what scientists call the Big Bang? I mean something physical had to have happened.
It is possible that God just said “Abbra Kadabbra” and the stuff appeared, but the Bible does talk about God stretching out the heavens also. I guess there is some debate on whether that really means God expanded the universe or not.
But, at the same time, I don’t like to use the phrase “the Big Bang” to describe what God did in the beginning becomes it comes with all the materialistic cosmological garbage. The “scientific” big bang demands billions of years for one thing.
However, sure, it would have been quite a “bang” when going from the instant where nothing appeared to the next instant when all of space, time, and matter appeared. Perhaps calling it God’s Big Bang would help to distinguish the biblical record from scientific speculation.
Lou
One thing that is in addition to the matter and energy is information. Werner Gitt has many books and theories about information and its origin. Information has no weight or energy yet we cannot exist without it. DNA, a very complex arrangement of atoms, carries information to transform matter and energy into the biological world around us.
Modern science has no natural explanation of the origin of information other than what is observed – information only comes from intelligence and a mind.